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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Whatever
Caste
Castes
Operates
Northern
Ireland
System
Class
Unionism
Call
Protestantism
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Write whatever you like!
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
I drink to keep body and soul apart.
Seamus Heaney
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
